From Iași to the Lower East Side
Samuel Simon Leibowitz was born on 14 August 1893 in Iași, in the Kingdom of Romania, the first child of Isaac and Bina Lebeau, Romanian Jews who left for America to escape the antisemitism of their homeland. The family reached New York on 14 March 1897, when Samuel was three. A neighbour advised his father that a different surname might help his business, and Lebeau became Leibowitz.
They lived in a tenement on Essex Street on the Lower East Side, the crowded heart of immigrant Jewish New York, while his father kept a small shop in East New York, Brooklyn. Samuel graduated from Jamaica High School in Queens, then went to Cornell University for both his undergraduate degree and his law degree, which he completed in 1915. On Christmas Day 1919 he married Belle Munves; they had three children.
The courtroom virtuoso
Leibowitz chose criminal defence at a time when it was a field many of the profession’s most ambitious lawyers avoided, and made it his stage. From around 1917 he built a practice in New York’s criminal courts and quickly became famous for meticulous preparation, theatrical cross-examination and an uncanny ability to read a jury. He represented clients from every corner of the city, including figures from its underworld, and the newspapers began to call him “the next Clarence Darrow.”
By the early 1930s his record in capital cases was astonishing. According to the historian Douglas Linder, he had defended clients in seventy-eight first-degree murder trials, winning seventy-seven acquittals; the seventy-eighth ended in a hung jury. The Encyclopaedia Judaica summarises his career more broadly: of the roughly 140 defendants he represented on capital charges, only one was executed. He had, in short, never lost a murder case, until he went to Alabama.
Taking the Scottsboro case
In March 1931 nine Black teenagers were taken off a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama, and accused of raping two white women. Within weeks, in trials held under the shadow of a lynch mob, eight of them were sentenced to death. In 1932 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in Powell v. Alabama because the defendants had been denied adequate counsel, and the case was sent back for retrial. The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party, which had taken up the defendants’ cause, asked Leibowitz to lead the defence.
It was an unlikely partnership. Leibowitz was a mainstream Democrat with no sympathy for communism, and he made clear that his political and economic views differed from the ILD’s. But after reading the trial record he became convinced the young men were innocent, and he said he would take the case to defend what he called “the basic rights of man.” His wife and many friends urged him not to; a Northern Jewish lawyer defending Black youths accused of raping white women in 1930s Alabama, they warned, had no chance. He accepted anyway, and for the next four years worked on the case without a fee and without reimbursement for most of his expenses.
Decatur, 1933
The first retrial, of Haywood Patterson, opened in Decatur, Alabama, in March 1933 before Judge James E. Horton. Leibowitz began by attacking the jury system itself, demonstrating that no Black citizen had served on a jury in the county within living memory although many were qualified. He insisted that Black witnesses be addressed with the same courtesy as white ones. He cross-examined the accuser, Victoria Price, for hours, exposing contradictions in her story. Then, in a moment of courtroom drama, the second alleged victim, Ruby Bates, walked into court and testified that there had been no rape at all.
The atmosphere was poisonous. Death threats were made against Leibowitz, and National Guardsmen were assigned to protect him and the defendants. In his closing argument, the county solicitor Wade Wright asked the jurors whether justice in this case was “going to be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.” Leibowitz demanded a mistrial and was refused. The jury convicted Patterson and sentenced him to death. Back in New York, Leibowitz spoke with fury about the jurors; his remarks were widely reported in the South and deepened the hostility toward him there.
A victory for every defendant
Two months later Judge Horton, persuaded that the evidence did not support the verdict, set it aside and ordered a new trial, a decision that cost him his seat on the bench at the next election. The cases were reassigned to Judge William Callahan, who overruled Leibowitz at almost every turn, and in late 1933 Patterson and Clarence Norris were again convicted and sentenced to death.
Leibowitz took the jury question to the United States Supreme Court, his first appearance there. He argued that the names of Black men found on the county’s jury rolls had been fraudulently added after the fact. When Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes asked whether he could prove it, Leibowitz had the original jury-roll books, and a magnifying glass, handed up to the bench, and the justices passed them from hand to hand. In April 1935, in Norris v. Alabama, the Court ruled unanimously that the systematic exclusion of Black citizens from juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. It was a landmark of American civil rights law, and its principle reached far beyond Scottsboro.
The compromise of 1937
The case still dragged on. By 1936 Leibowitz recognised that his own unpopularity in northern Alabama was hurting his clients, and he let a local lawyer, Clarence Watts, take the visible role in court while he directed the defence from the background. He also broke angrily with the ILD after two of its lawyers were charged with trying to bribe Victoria Price.
In secret negotiations with the state, Leibowitz eventually agreed to a compromise, “with a heavy heart” he said, because any outcome that kept innocent men in prison grieved him. In July 1937 Alabama dropped all charges against four of the defendants, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams and Roy Wright, and Leibowitz personally led them out of jail to freedom. The others remained imprisoned for years; Clarence Norris, the last surviving defendant, was pardoned by Alabama in 1976. Leibowitz kept in touch with some of the men, and later helped Norris find work in New York.
In the meantime he had returned to other work. He met the convicted Lindbergh kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann on death row several times, hoping to persuade him to reveal more about the crime, and in 1937 represented Robert Irwin, a former mental patient accused of a triple murder in Manhattan, negotiating a plea that spared Irwin the electric chair.
Jewishness in a hostile courtroom
Leibowitz’s Jewishness was never incidental to the Scottsboro story. He was the child of refugees from Romanian antisemitism, and in Alabama he heard the prosecution invite a jury to see him as the agent of “Jew money from New York.” Southern newspapers and crowds regularly cast him as a meddling outsider, and the combination of a Jewish lawyer, Communist sponsors and Black defendants made him a lightning rod for every prejudice of the time.
Outside the courtroom he was active in Jewish communal life. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records that he headed the United Organization for Israel Pioneers and was a member of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. His career also illustrates a broader pattern of the era, in which Jewish lawyers, many of them shut out of elite firms, took on unpopular defendants and civil-rights causes.
The judge
In 1940 Leibowitz was elected to a fourteen-year term on the Kings County Court, the principal criminal court in Brooklyn, and was re-elected in 1954. When the city’s county courts were merged into the New York State Supreme Court in 1962, he became a Supreme Court justice. The defender who had saved so many clients from the electric chair became one of the toughest judges in New York, known for heavy sentences, a hard line on organised crime and corrupt officials, and outspoken support for the death penalty as a deterrent. Critics nicknamed him a “hanging judge.” Among the cases he presided over was the 1945 assault trial of Brooklyn Dodgers manager Leo Durocher.
His temper on the bench drew criticism, and in 1963 the Association of the Bar of the City of New York opposed his continuation past the age of seventy. He was nonetheless certified to continue, and served until 1969, when he reached the final mandatory retirement age. In 1950 the journalist Quentin Reynolds had published an admiring biography of him, Courtroom.
Legacy
Samuel Leibowitz died in New York on 11 January 1978, aged 84. His papers are held at Cornell University, and the Scottsboro story has since been retold on film and on Broadway, where he appears as a character in Kander and Ebb’s musical The Scottsboro Boys.
His legacy is a paradox, the great defender who became a severe judge, but his most important victory is not in doubt. By carrying a magnifying glass and a set of doctored jury books to the Supreme Court, he helped establish that a court which shuts Black citizens out of the jury box cannot deliver justice. That principle, affirmed in Norris v. Alabama, became one of the foundations on which later civil-rights lawyers would build.
Sources & further reading
Samuel Leibowitz, Wikipedia · Scottsboro: Defense Attorney Samuel Leibowitz, American Experience, PBS · Douglas O. Linder, “The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys”, Famous Trials, UMKC School of Law · Leibowitz, Samuel Simon, Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopaedia Judaica) · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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